Thursday, March 8, 2012

The number of hate groups in the U.S. has grown each year for the past 11 years, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2000 the center reported that there were 602 hate groups; in 2011 that number had climbed to 1,018.

“We’ve never had a count that high before,” Mark Potok, the author of the report, told ABC News. “It’s just steady significant growth, 3, 4, 5 percent every year going back to the turn of the millennium.”

Potok said the increase from 2000 to 2008 was primarily fueled by the immigration debate.

“Around 2000, we saw very dramatically neo-Nazi groups, Klan groups and similar kinds of groups simply drop their propaganda about the alleged evils of black people, of gay people, of Jewish people in order to concentrate pretty much 100 percent on illegal immigrants,” he said. ”In 2008, we have two more factors come into play.